Portrait of a Lady

Between the world wars, a beautiful, artistic woman named Bobsy Goodspeed stood at the heart of Chicago's social and cultural scenes. Now, prompted by a salacious if glancing remark in a recent book, this forgotten woman re-emerges and opens the door on a vanished era peopled by painters and pianists, plutocrats and politicians—and an irresistible force named Gertrude Stein

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When not at home in Chicago, Bobsy ventured into the remote corners of the world. Between the two world wars, she apparently traveled to Europe most summers, looking to encounter the latest writer, painter, or musician. (On one of these trips, in 1934, she met Gertrude Stein—at her country retreat in Bilignen, situated in France's Rhone Valley—and encouraged her to come to Chicago). In the early years of their marriage, Bobsy and Barney also traveled to Japan, and at some point they explored the Alaskan wilderness, perhaps journeying as far north as the Arctic Circle. But none of those trips compared to the seven-month voyage around the world the Goodspeeds made in 1925 with two of their friends: John T. McCutcheon, the 54-year-old editorial cartoonist for the Tribune, and his wife, Evelyn, the 30-year-old daughter of the renowned North Shore architect Howard Van Doren Shaw.

The two couples departed Chicago on January 3rd and sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu four days later. From there, they headed to the remote reaches of the Pacific, collecting grass skirts and dolphin-tooth necklaces in New Guinea, escaping the equatorial heat of the Spice Islands with moonlight swims in shark-infested waters. By May they had reached Beijing, where they made arrangements to travel to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. The Chinese warlord Feng Yuxiang forbade the expedition, but the travelers surreptitiously went on with their plans. "We got our corduroy suits," wrote McCutcheon to a friend in Chicago, "our sheepskin sleeping bags, borrowed a couple revolvers, and [to throw the authorities off the scent] announced that we were going [only as far as] Kalgan," General Feng's most distant outpost. (Known today as Zhangjiakou, the city is about 100 miles northwest of Beijing.)

At dawn on the morning of May 16th, the travelers drove out from Kalgan in an open Dodge touring car heavily loaded with supplies. After two long days of travel, the foursome confronted the Gobi, which McCutcheon described as "flat as a billiard table." They followed a trail across the desert, where they were besieged by a fierce gale that flung sand into their faces like hot needles. The sand also infiltrated the car's magneto and carburetor, and when the storm let up, the Dodge wouldn't start. Far away to the south, McCutcheon spotted a group of yurts (Mongol huts), but how to get there? Bobsy and Evelyn had a solution: They stood up in the car holding a big, broad sheepskin coat between them. The men gave the Dodge a shove, the coat filled with wind, and the car took off, said McCutcheon, like "a regular ship of the desert." They reached the yurts, where the Mongol residents helped repair the car.

Two days later the Goodspeeds and the McCutcheons reached Ulan Bator. An officious customs inspector insisted on checking every article in the Dodge, and he spread the travelers' belongings across a field covered in manure. "No secrets were left undisclosed," said McCutcheon, who, with his traveling companions, refused to show any sign of  irritation. A few days later, after Bobsy and Evelyn became the first women to enter the sacred precincts of Ulan Bator's Gandan temple and lay eyes on its great gilded Buddha, the travelers returned safely to Beijing.

The rest of the trip must have seemed anticlimactic. The Trans-Siberian express carried the travelers to Moscow, where they saw Lenin's preserved corpse. Eventually they ended up in Paris, and in July the quartet sailed from London on the Leviathan, bound for New York. At the end of the month they were back in Chicago, where Bobsy and Evelyn, looking svelte in the latest Parisian couture, greeted friends at the annual Lake Forest horse show, their round-the-world trip already a memory. Likely nothing surpassed that experience until nine years later when Bobsy welcomed Gertrude Stein to Chicago, a culminating moment for both the infamous writer and her charming hostess.

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Photograph: Chicago Tribune photo

This article appears in the October 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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